IT industry body Nasscom said on Wednesday that India’s IT services exports would cross the $100 billion mark in 2015-16 and the sector would clock double digit growth in 2016-17. The optimism comes despite concerns about the impact of the election campaign in the United States, which accounts for half of India’s IT exports and the rise of protectionism in Europe and the U.K. The IT sector, which India’s largest private sector employer, is likely to add two lakh new jobs this year, taking its employeestrength to 3.7 million.It expects another two lakh new jobs in 2016-17 with an expected 10 per cent to 12 per cent growth in exports at the present currency valuations.The domestic growth is expected to be between 11 per cent and 13 per cent.
While global economic growth slowing to 2.4 per cent in 2015, spending on IT-business process management (IT-BPM) grew by a mere 0.4 per cent though this was largely due to the impact of currency fluctuations. Yet, the industry expects total revenues to grow to $143 billion in 2015-2016 from $132 billion a year agowith exports rising at 12.3 per cent.The IT industry body, which has now began to include e-commerce businesses in its domestic IT-BPM industry assessment, said online retail is growing at 20 per cent and would hit $17 billion in 2015-16 compared to $14 billion in the previous year. Stressing that the sector now contributes the highest relative share among industries to India’s economic activity at 9.3 per cent of gross domestic product, BVR Mohan Reddy, chairman of Nasscom, said that it also received the highest foreign direct investments this year with $7 billion inflows. This, he said, included about $5 billion invested in start-up ventures.
